Jesus of Suburbia
by Jommie Obsessed Zammie Lover
Summary: I promise this isn't religious, it is just the name of the story. This is a sort of songfic based off the Green Day song, Jesus of Suburbia, from their album American Idiot. I own no characters, nor do I own the song. I only own the cross between Gallagher Girls and Green Day that I made. T for the ending, which I am not spoiling.


**Okay guys. You can come at me with the pitchforks and torches, I deserve it. I have been a bit busy nowadays, drawing Green Day fan art. I am a huge Green Day fan, and that's how this story came to be. **

**This is a story based lightly on a song by Green Day, called Jesus of Suburbia/City of the Damned/I Don't Care/Dearly Beloved/Tales of Another Broken Home, mostly known as Jesus of Suburbia. I seriously recommend y'all looking it up on YouTube, it's a great song. Yes, it is a long song, but it is still amazing. **

**So, here it goes:**

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Zachary Goode was _not _a child resulting of love. Well, in a way, he was. But he wasn't completely made of love. He was the result of rage and love, coming from his mother and father, in the same order. Zach never was a normal kid in the suburbs where he lived. His friends called him the Jesus of Suburbia, and unlike what you'd be led to believe, he was not a martyr. He was far from one, honestly. Sure, he didn't really have a family to rely on when he most needed them and had severe abandonment issues, but he wouldn't have his life any other way.

He spent his days hopped up on cans of Coke and Ritalin, hoping that someone would care about him for once, for since his heartless mother had murdered his dearly beloved father and she had been arrested, he lived alone. To him, he was at the end of his road. He had lost all sense of control, and he had allowed his mind to break the spirit of his soul. He was broken. Not that anyone would care about that, seeing as he was technically not a minor anymore. But that didn't mean he didn't need someone to look after him. Zach acted without caring about the consequences, figuring he'd pay for all his sins in hell. As far as he could tell, he was right in doing so. He would pay for every single bad action he had done later on, but for now, he got away with everything. And that gave him the illusion that he would never get caught, not even by the devil himself.

Despite what his friends had told him, he never thought there was anything wrong with him. No matter how many times his best friends, Grant and Jonas, would tell him to seek help, he always said that he was the way he was supposed to be, completely messed up by his not-so-perfect childhood, but still mentally and emotionally intact in his head.

His friends made a joke about the well-known Jesus of Suburbia. His house was known as his crucifix between him and his small group of friends. He would spend his days standing on his crucifix; slowly wearing himself down while his mother and father weren't there to help him. He had no family left. A dead father and arrested mother that was in jail for life weren't much help. His aunts were all married and had families; most of them didn't even live in the country, if they were still alive, that is. The same went for his uncles. His grandparents were all dead. He was slowly pushing away all of his friends. Grant wasn't the same with him ever since he began acting differently, and so was Jonas, so he decided he wouldn't want to be friends with them anymore. He had no one to help him. For once, there was no one to save the Jesus of Suburbia.

But he wasn't only perishing away from his life style. His body had grown accustomed to the caffeine and Ritalin all day, with little to no food in between and almost no sleep. He was a boy in love as well, but the girl he loved probably didn't even know of his existence. Just like any rejected being, he fell back on alcohol and drugs to take away that sad sensation. He was past the point of delirium, not even knowing what he was on anymore, whether it was marijuana, cocaine or just regular cigarettes. But he didn't care; he just took it all, in the hopes of feeling better.

His friends got worried about their esteemed best friend. Despite the fact that Zach had pushed them away, Grant and Jonas still cared about him. They wouldn't give up on his friend just because he was going through tough times, especially when they were needed the most. Before all the drama in his childhood, he was perfectly fine. He used to be the kid that always had the best grades, but he wasn't a pompous jerk about it. He was popular, and not for the bad things he had done like he was known for nowadays, but for being a friendly guy who you always could count on. He was responsible, always staying on the right side of the law, even if his actions were a bit controversial. Zachary Goode was, to put it simply, a good kid, if you'll pardon the pun.

As a child, he would move around a lot because of his father's job. He had lived in almost all of the United States' states, and a few other countries as well. None of those places had ever felt like a home to him. Every time he'd say that, his mother, who still hadn't gone on her psychotic rage that would eventually lead to her murdering Zach's father, would tell him the same thing she always said.

_"Momma, when will we have a home? We have a house, but we don't have a home," a small Zach would tell his mother over and over. His mother, Catherine, would easily get flustered with that comment of his with the many times he'd bring it up. _

_"Zach, do you know what a home is?" She'd always ask him in response. As usual, he would shake his head, telling her that he didn't, in fact, know. "Honey, home is where your heart is," she would tell him, in the hopes that he would stop telling her that._

To him, that saying had always been a lie. His heart was always somewhere else, never where he was. As he grew older, he learned to how to answer his mother. Every time she'd say home is where his heart is, he'd have the urge to shoot back, "Well, what a shame, because everyone's heart doesn't beat the same. I guess mine is just beating out of time, then." Never had he had the arrogance to utter those words, of course. But every time he'd hear that, those 21 words would just play in a constant loop in his head, begging to be heard once.

Every big city, small town and foreign country he had lived in seemed to him like a lost highway, their signs misleading to nowhere. They were cities of the dead, towns of the damned and countries of the lost in his young mind. Never would he have believed how right he was. Every place he lived in, though, had one thing in common. The enormous differences between a large city such as New York and a small town such as Davenport aside, they had one thing that was the same. They all had strays. Whether they were stray hearts that belonged to someone else that somebody couldn't have, stray dogs with nowhere to go but the streets, hoping someone would take pity on them and take them in or stray children who had been abandoned by their parents and left to their own devices, there would always be strays.

And Zach somehow, always ended up somehow fitting into each of those categories. He didn't know where his heart was, hence the fact he had no home. He, just as the dogs, hoped someone would have mercy on him and tell him how to fix that huge mess his parents had left in their wake. And lastly, just as the abandoned children, he was abandoned by his mother, who was the one parent that would always be around to take care of him in the absence of his father. He was a stray just like any of those children, but he had a house to go home to.

He hadn't moved since his mother had been arrested, so he was still in the same as she was. He decided to visit her on an impulse, not allowing the still somewhat functioning part of his brain talk him out of it. He got in his late father's car and drove to the prison she was being held in, leaving the prison he had confined himself in for so long. He got some dirty looks from the officers who were at work there when he walked in. Everyone knew who he was. When he requested to see his mother, though, eyebrows were raised. Everyone who knew who he was knew he hated his mother with a burning passion. But he was still taken to talk to his mother, no questions asked.

When Catherine laid her eyes on him, she wasn't sure what to expect. Was she surprised to see her son there, when she knew for a fact that he wanted nothing to do with her? Yes, she was, but she didn't show it. He began talking.

"Mother," he greeted coldly. You could just hear the anger in his voice.

"Zachary, what a pleasant visit. Why are you here? Because I'm pretty sure you didn't come just to talk to me. You and I both know that," she shot back venomously in the same tone he had used with her. That was a good question though. Why had he driven three miles out of the small suburb he lived in, just to see someone he hated? It didn't make any sense.

"Mother, am I disturbed?" he asked, subtle as ever. "Because growing up with you as a parent must've made me that way," he explained. Not giving her time to answer, he asked her, "Am I insane or am I insecure? Maybe I'm in the small space in between," he mused to himself. "Did you know that Grant and Jonas told me to go to therapy to fill the void you left when you were arrested?" he asked lightly, more than sure that she didn't know. It was all good. It wasn't like he expected her to know. "I know nobody is perfect, and I stand accused, but seriously, couldn't you have at least tried to take care of me?" he asked, now getting angry with her. "I am a mess, Mother. And do you know why I am a mess? Do you?" he yelled, accusing her. Now it was clear why he went there. He needed someone to blame for the way he turned out, and frankly, his mother was the best bet.

He had left soon after, leaving a dumbfounded psychopath in his wake. He decided he would move away again. For the last time, he promised himself. He just needed to be away from this all. He couldn't keep living in this town where everything crowded him. He could barely breathe. One of his life lessons he had received from his grandfather as a small child was, "_To live and not to breathe is to die in tragedy"_, and that was what gave him the courage to pack up and leave. This time, he was going to move of his own accord. This time, he would choose where he would go. And, most importantly, this time, he could maybe find not only a house, but also a home. He was always a believer in fresh starts, and this was his chance to get one.

When he left, he would not only leave behind all his infamous activities, his mother and his old life, but would he also leave all those lies behind. The lies, of course, would never escape him. Every time people asked how he was coping with everything and he'd say he was fine, that was just one of his lies, and it was one of the few lies that were left behind. All those lies that came with the question "Isn't your mother that woman who killed her husband in front of her son about 6 years ago or something?" and things of the sort would never leave him alone.

Zach could still remember how, when his family had somehow brought him to the small town of Davenport, Nebraska, his father had told him to have a little faith, and that all of the best things happened out of the blue, and in the middle of nowhere. His faith in the small town was lost. He was convinced that nothing happens in small towns that don't exist. But then again, his mother's case had been known nationally, because nothing that horrific had every happened. Sure, many crazy wives had already killed their husbands, but that horrible being he shared blood with had somehow managed to make it worse, by committing the murder in front of him.

He couldn't even count how many times he had walked down this road, contemplating on whether or not he should really leave. Every time, when he reached a fork in the road that would lead back to where he was, he would go back, but not this time. This time, he was leaving for good. He decided to not sell the house, but to still let people know he was gone. He grabbed some red paint he had and began writing on the walls:

_"I don't feel any shame, and I won't apologize  
When there ain't nowhere you can go  
Running away from pain when you've been victimized  
Tales from another broken home"_

After he finished, he didn't even bother wiping the paint that was running down the walls, leaving it like that made it seem like blood, and that reminded him of how hard it was those 6 years, being constantly reminded of everything that his mother had done. He remembered everything, and that was how this had all started. He wanted nothing more than to forget. So instead of packing up and leaving, he grabbed a knife from his kitchen and put an end at his road.

The message he left behind was found a few days after by his two friends, who cried at the sight of their friend's lifeless body surrounded by dried up blood.

Maybe the Jesus of Suburbia was a martyr after all.

* * *

**So, love it? Hate it? Hate the end? Love the end? I know, I know. I feel bad, BUT it had to be done. I couldn't see any other possibility for the end of this story. I am so sorry, but to brighten up your guys' day, at least it had extremely light Zammie. Brownie points to whoever can find where it is, and a shout out in a future one shot I plan on doing. Sounds good?**

**Please, tell me what you guys think, because I am seriously considering handing this in instead of my Wake Me Up When September Ends songfic as my G&C project. I wrote it at 3-something-AM, so don't blame me if it sucks. **

**Over and out  
~JOZL**


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